Quitting Cigarettes? Joints Rolled With CBD Might Help
By Elise McDonough, courtesy of Leafly
"There’s never a bad time to leave your tobacco-using days behind—for good.
One potential way to make quitting easier and more fun is by switching to pre-made cannabis joints (pre-rolls) that are rich in cannabidiol (CBD), marijuana’s secondary active ingredient. In a small 2013 study,1 CBD users cut cigarette intake by 40%.
CBD comes from the cannabis plant, but it doesn’t make you feel high like pot’s main active ingredient, THC. Instead, studies indicate CBD can reduce social anxiety, inflammation, and create a calm feeling without much euphoria.
CBD is also empowering plenty of smokers to step down from highly addictive and carcinogenic tobacco. The World Health Organization concludes CBD is not habit-forming. And NIDA-funded research failed to find an association between cannabis smoking and lung disease or cancer. These CBD-rich pre-rolls help people quit by offering a similar experience for when intense cravings hit, such as during social occasions, right after sex, or other times when you might habitually light up a cigarette.
A 2019 review of early clinical studies finds that “animal and human studies suggest that [CBD has] the potential to reduce craving and relapse in abstinent substance users, by impairing reconsolidation of drug-reward memory, salience of drug cues, and inhibiting the reward-facilitating effect of drugs.”
A 2018 double-blind, placebo-controlled study of a mega-dose of CBD (800 mg) for tobacco cessation found that it helped quitters pay less attention to tobacco around them. That is, CBD reduced salience and pleasantness of cigarette cues,2 but didn’t lessen cravings or withdrawal.
Federal cannabis prohibition stymies further research, but legal cannabis markets like California have surged ahead in offering CBD-rich products aimed at everyone age 21 and up, including ex-smokers.
Some of the brands listed here blend CBD with THC to deliver effects all along the spectrum from “slightly high” to “kinda high,” so make sure to seek out 100% CBD products if you don’t want to your state of mind altered. You can find CBD-rich pre-rolls across California in the state’s 600-plus licensed stores and more than 135 licensed delivery services."
Read the rest of the article on Leafly:
https://www.leafly.com/news/strains-products/quitting-cigarettes-joints-rolled-with-cbd-might-help#:~:text=One%20potential%20way%20to%20make,cut%20cigarette%20intake%20by%2040%25.
1. Morgan CJ, Das RK, Joye A, Curran HV, Kamboj SK. Cannabidiol reduces cigarette consumption in tobacco smokers: preliminary findings. Addict Behav. 2013;38(9):2433-2436. doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2013.03.011
2. Hindocha C, Freeman TP, Grabski M, et al. Cannabidiol reverses attentional bias to cigarette cues in a human experimental model of tobacco withdrawal [published online ahead of print, 2018 May 1]. Addiction. 2018;113(9):1696-1705. doi:10.1111/add.14243